Columbia River Habitat Monitoring Program (CHaMP) and the Integrated Status and Effectiveness Monitoring Program (ISEMP)

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Project description

The Integrated Status and Effectiveness Project (ISEMP) was created nearly 10 years ago to systematically answer questions such as "what is the best way to measure stream habitat?" and "what is the best way to measure salmonid populations?" These questions are related to the management that underpins the proposed tributary habitat-based, off-site mitigation strategy of the Federal Columbia River Power System Biological Opinion (FCRPS BiOp) quantitative tools that relate habitat condition to fish populations in a framework that supports habitat and population management decision making. We develop monitoring conducted under the ISEMP project which falls into three discrete, but related, categories:

Status and trends: We monitor data on fish and habitat to track and evaluate fish-habitat relationships at the Evolutionary Significant Unit (ESU), subbasin, and population levels.

Action Effectiveness: We evaluate the effect of habitat actions, both project level (i.e., type of project) and watershed level (i.e., cumulative projects in a given area) on fish populations.

Analytical Framework: We provide the context for monitoring data to address fish-habitat relationships, limiting factors, and whether management actions and restoration has led to changes in fish and their habitat.

ISEMP has developed fish and habitat status and trends monitoring efforts in the Wenatchee, John Day, South Fork Salmon, and Lemhi subbasins and in 2011 initiated the Columbia Habitat Monitoring Program (CHaMP) to further develop standardized fish and habitat monitoring.

The goal of CHaMP is to generate and implement a standard set of fish habitat monitoring (status and trend) methods in up to 26 watersheds across the Columbia River basin. The watersheds have been chosen to maximize the contrast in current habitat conditions and also represent a temporal gradient of expected change in condition through planned habitat actions. Surveys will be conducted in watersheds with perceived large juvenile life-stage survival gaps due to habitat impairments or that are home to existing high quality fish monitoring infrastructure. CHaMP implementation will occur on the spatial scale of the Technical Recovery Team (TRT) populations with the intention for inference on habitat quality and quantity at the fish population level.